Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [105]
He wasn’t svelte by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t Joséph Conrad’s wife no more, either. Earlier in the month he’d even spoken to a bespectacled black girl on a bus, said, So, you’re into photosynthesis, and she’d actually lowered her issue of Cell and said, Yes, I am. So what if he hadn’t ever gotten past Earth Sciences or if he hadn’t been able to convert that slight communication into a number or a date? So what if he’d gotten off at the next stop and she hadn’t, as he had hoped? Homeboy was, for the first time in ten years, feeling resurgent; nothing seemed to bother him, not his students, not the fact that PBS had canceled Doctor Who, not his loneliness, not his endless flow of rejection letters; he felt insuperable, and Santo Domingo summers…well, Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure, even for one as nerdy as Oscar.
Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes, and pilots fear for their planes — overburdened beyond belief — and for themselves; restaurants, bars, clubs, theaters, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over. Like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order: Back home, everybody! Back home! From Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr to Amsterdam, from Lawrence to San Juan; this is when basic thermodynamic principle gets modified so that reality can now reflect a final aspect, the picking-up of big-assed girls and the taking of said to moteles; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape — yes, sir, nothing like a Santo Domingo summer. And so for the first time in years Oscar said, My elder spirits have been talking to me, Ma. I think I might accompany you. He was imagining himself in the middle of all that ass-getting, imagining himself in love with an Island girl. (A brother can’t be wrong forever, can he?)
So abrupt a change in policy was this that even Lola quizzed him about it. You never go to Santo Domingo. He shrugged. I guess I want to try something new.
THE CONDENSED NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO A NATIVELAND
Family de León flew down to the Island on the fifteenth of June. Oscar scared shitless and excited, but no one was funnier than their mother, who got done up like she was having an audience with King Juan Carlos of Spain himself: If she’d owned a fur she would have worn it, anything to communicate the distance she’d traveled, to emphasize how not like the rest of these dominicanos she was. Oscar, for one, had never seen her looking so dolled-up and elegante. Or acting so comparona.
Belicia giving everybody a hard time, from the check-in people to the flight attendants, and when they settled into their seats in first class (she was paying) she looked around as if scandalized: These are not gente de calidad!
It was also reported that Oscar drooled on himself and didn’t wake up for the meal or the movie, only when the plane touched down and everybody clapped.
What’s going on? he demanded, alarmed.
Relax, Mister. That just means we made it.
The beat-you-down heat was the same, and so was the fecund tropical smell that he had never forgotten, that to him was more evocative than any madeleine, and likewise the air pollution and the thousands of motos and cars and dilapidated trucks on the roads